Six months in, what have Laramie’s rental regulations accomplished?

Less than half of Laramie’s landlords have complied with the City Rental Housing Code. So far, five complaints have been filed with the city, but more are expected when UW students return this fall.

In its first six months, the Laramie Rental Housing Code has seen roughly 600 landlords register nearly 3,400 rental units. City officials say they feel good about that number, despite it representing less than half of Laramie’s estimated 8,000-9,000 rentals.

The housing code required landlords to register each of their properties by the start of 2023. Many did, but likely several hundred landlords are still currently out of compliance.

“Overall, I think it's gone very well,” City Manager Janine Jordan said. “I would like to see a more rapid rate of property owners applying. We had an initial big push, but there are certainly many more out there who we would like to get registered and licensed within the city.”

Laramie is a city of renters. It’s home to both the University of Wyoming and one of the poorest populations in the state, and more than half of its residents rent the home they live in.

With a hot rental market, a desperate population and little state regulation, Laramie has become infamous as a playground for unscrupulous landlords.

In such a large barrel, bad apples are numerous.

As part of the city’s multi-year push to improve the quantity and quality of housing, the Laramie City Council started discussing rental regulations as early as 2019, but only passed the City Rental Housing Code in the first days of 2022.

The Rental Housing Code outlines basic health and safety standards for rental units within city limits. They require, for example, that a unit be structurally sound, that its major plumbing, heating and electrical work be completed by licensed professionals, and that it be free of pests and mold.

Registrations are “halfway there”

The Housing Code also requires landlords to register each unit they rent, paying a nominal fee and attesting that their property meets the new health and safety standards. As of July 7, the city has issued a total of 1,058 licenses, representing a total of 3,373 rental units in Laramie. (One landlord or property manager might have multiple licenses, depending on how they registered their properties.)

“We're about halfway there,” Assistant City Manager Todd Feezer said. “We have recently picked up a few others so I'm excited to see that. But we'll keep pushing it.”

Jordan added that registration benefits tenants, landlords and even the city itself, which has until now lacked any concrete data on how many landlords are operating in the city. That could be a major problem for community safety.

In the wake of a suburban Colorado wildfire that destroyed nearly 1,000 homes, one Laramie city councilor remarked that, without a way to reliably contact the majority of property owners in a given neighborhood, deciding where to commit resources would be difficult. But having contact information for the city’s landlords would also be useful for more mundane reasons.

“We’ll have a database of our landlords and be able to communicate with them and hopefully provide helpful information to them about how to connect to utilities or garbage services or things like that,” Jordan said. “And so in a way, this will give us a better communication channel to work with our landlords in town.”

The process might even benefit landlords, Jordan said, as the compliance checklist provides a handy way of determining whether one has “covered their bases.”

“I rent a property and I thought (registration) was 1. An easy process, but 2. an informative process,” Jordan said. “We asked our landlords to execute a self-compliance checklist. And on that checklist are just really basic things that are necessary to make your property habitable and safe. And so hopefully our landlords see that as an exercise that's just really basic, but keeps everybody on the same page about the things that are needed in a rental property.”

Both registrations and the complaints that force those registrations are likely to increase when students return in the fall.

“Laramie has a really set cycle of leases being entered into — typically for 12 months — and that occurs May through August,” Jordan said. “As people enter into those leases — some of them sight unseen from other parts of the country — and come to town and maybe have concerns about the habitability of their rental, we expect everything to pick up.”

Digging into the licenses

The Laramie Reporter filed a records request for various items related to the City Rental Housing Code. The results show the extent to which individuals and individual organizations can come to control a significant proportion of Laramie rentals.

• There are nine licenses registered to Trevor Thatcher for a total of 136 individual units, including 51 at an apartment complex two blocks from the UW campus.

• There are 83 licenses registered to “J.T. Walsh” for a total of 450 individual units. J.T. Walsh is the owner of the property management group Real Estate 1 and the licenses cover their extraordinary number of units across town.

• There are 25 licenses registered to Bell Leasing, LLC, for a total of 65 units. That includes the 24 units at Bell’s Canby Street complex, where the company raised rents in the summer of 2021. Bell Leasing blamed its $80/month rent hike on the $1.67/month fee they paid to register each unit. (The company also blamed increases in property taxes and insurance rates, but their math doesn’t add up.) Bell Leasing has fought the rental housing code since Day 1. Just weeks after its passage last year, the company launched a lawsuit to halt the city’s rental housing code, claiming it was not constitutional. Albany County District Court ruled that it was.

• For other landlords, it’s difficult to pinpoint the true number of licenses and properties under their ownership or management. For example, under his own name, Stephen Pence holds two licenses for a total of five units. But he is also the owner of Laramie Property Management Group, which holds three licenses for an additional 13 units. He is also the owner of “165 N 3rd Street, LLC,” an entity with partial legal ownership of the property described in its name. There are 31 units registered under that LLC’s license. So, despite holding just two licenses under his own name, Pence has some level of control over 46 total rental units.

City Manager Jordan, City Councilor Erin O’Doherty, and Wyoming State Auditor Kristi Racines also appear on a list of licensees acquired through the records request. Each has registered a single unit.

Former Councilors Jessica Stalder and Fred Schmechel have also registered properties. Stalder voted against rental regulations during her time in office. Schmechel, on the other hand, supported the regulations throughout his tenure.

Five complaints filed in the first six months

The city does not inspect all rental units to verify that they meet the health and safety requirements.

Instead, the entire city rental housing code is enforced via a complaint process.

If rental tenants learn that their unit is not registered with the city — or notice that it fails to live up to the standards outlined in the code — they must personally take action before the city will get involved. The tenant must start by giving their landlord a written notice, informing them that they are out of compliance.

“The goal is to create and facilitate dialogue between the tenant and the landlord and create a space where first that conversation has to occur between those private parties,” Jordan said.

If the landlord does not rectify the situation, the tenant may then file an official complaint with the city. The city manager’s office then oversees an inspection of the unit to verify the tenant’s complaint and can take action to force the landlord to comply with the City Rental Housing Code.

If the landlord were to persist in their non-compliance, it could net them a criminal charge and cost them a fine.

“There's a potential $100 fine per month for every month that it was not registered … if we ever did get into that point, where we got to court and courts found it (was a violation), then it's $1,200 a year for every year that it wasn't registered.”

There have been five official complaints filed since the beginning of 2023. None have advanced to legal proceedings.

Feezer described the most recent complaint, which involved a renter discovering that her landlord had not registered the units in her building.

“The philosophy I’m using is, ‘Hey, we got a complaint on your rental, it's not registered, the first thing you need to do is register,’” Feezer said. “And that did result in that landlord registering his four units. And so now we've got those four units registered.”

Surprise, surprise

That landlord was Maximus Bossarei, the records request revealed.

Bossarei is notorious throughout Laramie’s renting population for renting dilapidated and unsanitary units, responding to requests for maintenance with threats, double-renting units, unjustly keeping deposits, ghosting the tenants seeking the return of their deposits, dodging law enforcement when those same tenants try to sue, even absconding with tenant possessions.

There are at least $16,000 in contested deposit and rent payments Bossarei has been able to keep — not by defending his right to it in court, but simply by making himself unreachable by law enforcement.

There are countless more deposits he has kept that have not been contested in court; many of his tenants simply wish to sever ties with a man they find threatening and domineering, even if it costs them a significant chunk of change. Several have said they put Bossarei — and by extension, Laramie — behind them for the sake of their mental health.

Last year, Bossarei bought a $1 million home in a gated community outside of Laramie.

One of his rental properties — a uniquely shaped apartment building on the corner of 5th Street and Sheridan Avenue — was the subject of one of the city’s first five complaints.

A tenant there complained about a number of code violations — from unsafe and unsanitary plumbing work to failures to weatherproof the house, to the clear presence of rodents — as well as the landlord’s refusal to supply a copy of his city-issued registration license.

Of course, Bossarei could not provide that license because the four units in that property were not registered with the city. They have since been registered and the city has ordered him to fix the other violations.

The case is ongoing. In the meantime, Bossarei’s other properties remain unregistered. Bossarei owns or co-owns a total of 13 properties within city limits, the majority of which are rentals and most of which do not appear on the most recent list of registered units.

Properties that Bossarei co-owns with other people have been registered. But with the exception of the property he was forced to list, the various rental units across Laramie for which Bossarei is the sole owner remain unregistered.

Tenants living in his other units across town could, at this moment, start the process that would eventually force him to pay the registration fee.

But the city will not proactively take measures against him; it will take a tenant challenging the man who controls their access to shelter.